4 Ways to Revive Your Passion for Nursing

2. Dream Big.

If you’ve been a nurse for a while, odds are there’s something you’d like to see changed in your clinic, hospital or profession. It might be something small, such as a simple tweak to the nurse’s station to improve efficiency, or something more ambitious, like a system-wide initiative that upgrades the care patients receive. Many nurses see the job of initiating change as rocking the boat. They figure it’s not worth the extra hassle and rationalize that they got into the profession to help patients, not to fight bureaucracy.

To be sure, you have to pick your battles, but you don’t have to accept the status quo. If your question “Why do we do things this way?” is met with the typical (and lame) “Because we’ve always done them this way,” you’ve just encountered proof that people have stopped asking questions. If you believe a proposed change could dramatically help 50, 100 or even 1,000 patients, isn’t that worth the effort? Throughout the course of history, impossible things have been accomplished by people who refused to accept the the idea that something couldn’t be done. Kids dream big—so should you.